"KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality."

That's not entirely true. Which GPU stressing apps are you using in Linux? All apps using OpenGL and running on Linux doesn't stress the GPU too much. And even if they do stress the GPU, running full screen makes the GPU use the resources only for that app and not for desktop drawing.

Even if you use the full capabilities in OpenGL 4, you won't consume much resources and even a lousy GPU such as GMA 950 would do the job. Windows 7 Aero use the full power of DirectX but it doesn't use very much GPU power. I think the same is true for Os X quartz.

As someone said in this thread, not using the latest and greatest when you can it's a waste. The only logical reason for KDE and Compiz to use OpenGL ES 2.0 would be to support Wayland.

Turnig off the kwin compositing (or even the compiz compositing) definitely improves the OpenGL performance of applications.

Even when OpenGL games and benchmarks are running full-screen, in some configurations there still is a penalty imposed by Compiz. Compiz does not stop itself when a game or application is running full-screen even though you are not using any Compiz plug-ins or desktop effects and as such, indirect rendering is still being used.

Those results from nearly one year ago showed that the open-source Intel and ATI Radeon drivers took an approximate 15% performance hit when Compiz was running rather than GNOME's Metacity when using Kernel mode-setting and DRI2. With the proprietary Catalyst driver there was little impact along with NVIDIA's binary driver, but there still was a performance penalty in some tests.

Since it's been nearly one year since those tests were carried out, and the Linux graphics drivers have advanced a great deal, particularly the open-source Gallium3D drivers, I have performed a new set of benchmarks to see if running Compiz with full-screen games at the server's native resolution still hurts the overall performance. The Compiz performance is also becoming more important since this compositing window manager is to play a critical role in Canonical's Unity Desktop for Ubuntu 11.04.

To answer the question of those that were wondering about how KDE/KWin affects the gaming performance, yes, depending upon the graphics processor and driver there can be a performance hit similar to that of running Compiz due to the compositing that still takes place within a full-screen application. However, the performance between running Compiz and KWin is not always the same.